I daily drove a Windows VM on Unraid for a solid 6 months. I did it because I’d wanted to try it out for a long time and after upgrading my server I finally had the resources to spare to try it out. Would I recommend it? Not for most people, especially if you intend to game on it. Most anything with fascistic anti-cheat will not run because it detects that it’s in a VM, so it really limits your options. Performance-wise, the games that did run ran pretty well. FO76 ran between 80-120 FPS at 4K with most settings maxed. Similar with Destiny 2. I didn’t do a lot of gaming during that time but those 2 titles were the most notable ones.

As for regular desktop use, most of the time I didn’t even think about the fact that I was on a VM. There was a weird issue that affected only YouTube in Chrome where pages would load but most of the elements on the page would take 5-30 seconds to fully pop in. I tried it on several browsers and it had the same issue. That was really the only notable issue I had though.

In summary, I’m glad I did it because it was something that I really wanted to try because virtualization in general I just find super interesting. If it’s something that similarly interests you a lot and you like tinkering, then go for it just to get it out of your system. I’m glad to be back on bare-metal for my daily driver PC though.

For reference, my Unraid server consisted of a 7950x (16-core), RTX 3090 (now relocated to my daily PC), and 64GB RAM. I allocated 6 cores (isolated from the host), 24GB RAM, and the 3090 passed through to the gaming VM. Also had a USB controller passed through. For storage I used a vdisk on an NVMe drive. Intended to pass through an NVMe drive but never got around to it.

I think this comment convinced me. Because you’re right, on Reddit there were always offshoot communities that were essentially the same exact thing just of different sizes and run by different people. There’ll probably always be the “most popular” one, and then several offshoots for the same topic but perhaps a better sense of community because it’s hundreds or thousands of users vs millions or tens of millions of users.

Remembering the exact instance and community name combinations will take a little extra effort, but not significantly and subscribing negates that mostly.